Nearly 18 million youngsters live in poverty in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) 10 years after the shift from communist to market-led economies, a UN report said yesterday.
Rising numbers of children are ending up being cared for in institutions as families struggle to cope, according to the report by the UN Children's Fund (UNICEF) entitled "A Decade of Transition".
It said that around 1.5 million children were in public care at the end of the 1990s, or 150,000 more than at the start of the decade, adding that the sharpest increase had occurred in the Baltic states.
The report reviews the impact of 10 years of transition in the 12 member countries of the CIS - an organisation uniting all former Soviet republics minus the three Baltic states - plus Central and Eastern Europe.
Covering 27 countries and a collective population of more than 400 million, 108 million of them young people, the report by UNICEF's Innocenti Research Centre in Florence, Italy, however, finds huge disparities.
"Thanks to a decade of strenuous efforts, child mortality rates have fallen in many countries. However, millions of children continue to suffer from poverty, ill health and marginalisation," UNICEF's executive director, Ms Carol Bellamy, said.
As real incomes have fallen over the last decade, the number of children in poor families has sharply increased. At the end of the 1990s nearly 18 million children of up to 17 years of age were living on less than $2.15 a day.
Just under 60 million children and young people in the region were living on less than $4.30 a day, it added.
In addition, HIV/AIDS cases are rising, especially in Russia and Ukraine, and tuberculosis has returned to the region with 50 per cent increases registered in poorer countries.
In many parts of the region, family allowances were markedly cut in the 1990s and the UNICEF report calls for a sustained effort to address child poverty, including the support of family incomes via tax and benefit systems and economic policy.
It also calls for regular and independent reporting on the quality of institutional care, while insisting that support services need to be beefed up and family-based care solutions encouraged.
A stronger focus is also needed on preventative health care, health education and public health programmes, while it notes that public investment in education in several countries is currently low.
"Educational budgets could be used more efficiently by reducing the number of teachers, paying them more and on time," it said.
Ms Bellamy said " we must not forget the original goals of the transition - to raise the standard of living and to develop humane and democratic societies. These goals need to be reaffirmed." The report said future economic growth in the former communist countries should be handled in a way that will benefit everyone, and the fall in births leaves no excuse for inadequate investment in children.